As unpleasant as it is, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do: force feeding a cat can make the difference between life and death, especially if your cat is overweight (fat cats are prone to idiopathic hepatic lipidosis and so should never go without food for more than 24 hours). The advice I'm about to give comes with the following caveat: if your cat has not eaten for more than two days, take it to the vet, and preferably get a blood panel done. The blood panel will tell you if anything internal is amiss, and can be a far better gauge of your cat's health than a physical exam.

How to force feed a cat:

1) Get a syringe. There is no need for the needle bit, so don't get that.

2) Get a can of wet food. You do not want to use dry food for this, as the bacteria count on dry food is very high and you'll essentially be feeding a sick cat bacteria soup.

3) Add enough water to the wet food to get it into a semi-liquid state, watery enough to draw up through the sryinge. I mix this up in a little bowl, so as not to waste the food.

4) Go to your cat. Do not announce your intentions, do not make a fuss. Force feeding is unpleasant for the cat and if you start making a fuss about it, it may learn to associate fussing and announcements with unpleasant things. For the same reason, do not call the cat to you (is it odd that I can call my cats to me?) - you do not want them to associate normally good things with the bad thing that is about to happen to them.

5) Hold the cat so that its back is against your body, and your arms on either side. Use one hand to hold its head so that it can't wriggle backwards. With the other, stick the syringe into one corner of the cat's mouth, pointing towards the roof of the mouth, and push slowly, about 1 cc every 2-3 seconds. Hold onto the cat; it will start licking and slurping and odds are it'll get food all over the place. But the important thing is that the cat has at least gotten some food inside it.

6) Give plenty of praise and let the cat go.

Whether it's better to give a syringe of food every hour, or get they day's feeding done all at once, will depend on the cat and the tenacity of the owner. I tend to think that lots of small feedings work best, as the cat will have a chance to de-stress after each feeding.

Now, some of you might be thinking, "Yeah, right! My cat's a hellion! There's no way I can do that!" If you truly can't contain your cat, consider boarding it at the vet's, and, when it's better, training it so that next time this happens, you'll be able to administer the care it needs. It can be done - my cats are mild-mannered enough to accept regular claw-clippings and teeth inspections from me, and still snuggle up in bed later that night.

Administering care to a beloved pet is never fun. But loving an animal sometimes comes with its own set of chores, and giving care to one is part of the deal.

Learn more about this author, Judy Lin.
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